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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bond_bubble who wrote (59033)	4/21/2006 5:39:54 PM
From: shades	Respond to of 110194

why do you want to always blame oil for the high cost of food making? My grandpa used pack animals - the people that bought his farm used tractors and oil and have big wealth and power now. what if the land prices were lower, Boy I know some guys in central florida and alabama that can get lots of cheap land. what if the interest rate (cost of borrowing to do farming) was lower, Some of my friends are PAID not to GROW corn - silly eh? world trade talks breaking down because they don't want to stop PAYING my friend to NOT grow CORN and keep poor thirdworlder beat down. what if farmers were allowed to stay close to lake/consumer and farm (so that they spend less on energy) Well if energy gets expensive enough - I am sure this will be the future for most of us. I just read on FDA chinese poultry decision they can buy US poultry - ship it over to china - process it in china - then send it back here for sale - silly eh? All these efficiencies have been distorted by the credit bubble - the farmer is told to do with costly land (competing with the house builders), far from markets etc. Many orange groves here stopped being profitable. Foreign worker can make it cheaper - as long as transportation costs dont get too crazy. financial jobs pay less than farm jobs Hmm, goldman sachs VP never gonna make less than my grandpa working in the hot sun 20 hours a day eh? I earlier posted a quote from Schumpeter's book that urban real estate crashed in 1929. It did not say 80% crash for residential houses but for farm lands. Farm lands created lot of bad loans for banks. Yah my grandpa was one of them - he thought it better to be a farmer than a landlord - HAHA! that computes to 12% fall in CPI. That is still the significant part of negative CPI in 1929... Do you think 30% is still to too much a fall. Schumpeter talks about credit purchases in RE as well. chromatic dispersion has his version of history Message 22379295 Source Material Richard Duncan’s The Dollar Crisis Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz A Monetary History of the United States Murrey Rothbard A History of Money and Banking in the United States Murrey Rothbard America’s Great Depression You like your author better than Rothbard? Today China has lot of savings (in UST). If there is a banking crises in China, their saving would save the banks. Now, if they revalue yuan, Chinese savings value (in yuan) falls!! So Chinese will have less saving to stave off the bank problem. I think this is what Japanese are referring to. Had Japanese not revalued, they could have pushed some of their bank burdens to Americans!! That is why Chinese are refusing to devalue (I think) and instead asking the US to bear the full cost by asking Fed to raise rates. I agree on this from what I have read - china will make MAJOR error if they revalue.

To: bond_bubble who wrote (59033)	4/21/2006 5:45:10 PM
From: patron_anejo_por_favor	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 110194

Although I agree that the Real Estate bubble has distorted land usage throughout the country, Shades' contention that ag output is heavily dependant on oil is still valid. Plowing, planting, harvesting, irrigation....all require heavy amounts of diesel or gas in the US. Try doing that stuff by hand, or mule-drawn plow, productivity goes way down (which was why farmers were "early adopters" of internal combustion technology). In addition, fertilizers are made from natural gas, and pesticides from petrochemicals. Not to mention transport from farm to processing location to grocery store to table. Take away those sources and you've got a hell of alot of starvation worldwide. It's probably Kunstler's favorite theme in The Long Emergency..... When oil does get too scarce to run tractors, combines and the like or to move farm output to people, the people will have to countermigrate back to the country, and/or die-off. I'm seriously considering an investment in farmland right now (any reco's from boardsters would be appreciated by the way....)

To: bond_bubble who wrote (59033)	4/21/2006 5:56:07 PM
From: shades	Respond to of 110194

Rothbard and Schumpeter mises.org Consequently Rothbard concluded, if all government action rests on expropriation, and no expropriation can be said to increase social utility, then welfare economics must call for the abolition of the state. Scores of political philosophers and economists, from Thomas Hobbes to James Buchanan and the modern public-choice economics, have attempted to escape from this conclusion by portraying the state as the outcome of contracts, and hence, a voluntary and welfare-enhancing institution. In reply to such endeavors, Rothbard agreed with Joseph Schumpeter that “the theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of purchase of services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.”[15] From Hobbes to Buchanan, statists had tried to overcome the apparent contradiction in the idea of a “voluntary” state equipped with compulsory judicial monopoly and the power to tax by recourse to the intellectual make-shift of “implicit” or “conceptual” agreements, contracts, or constitutions. Rothbard explained that all of these typically tortuous attempts ultimately only lead to the same inescapable conclusion: “implicit” and “conceptual” contracts are the very opposite of contracts, i.e., no contracts. Hence, it is impossible to derive a welfare-economic justification for the state. No one can possibly—demonstrably—agree to permanently surrender jurisdiction over his person and private property to someone else unless he had sold or otherwise given all of his current possessions away and subsequently committed suicide; likewise no one who is alive, can possibly—demonstrably—enter a contract that permits someone else—his protector—to determine for ever unilaterally, without the continued consent of the protected, the tribute that the protected must pay for his protection. In particular, Rothbard scorned the idea of a “limited” protective state as self-contradictory and incompatible with the promotion of social utility. Limited government always has the inherent tendency to become unlimited (totalitarian) government. Given the principle of government—judicial monopoly and the power to tax—any notion of restraining government power and safeguarding individual life and property is illusory. Under monopolistic auspices, the price of justice and protection will rise and the quality of justice and protection will fall. A tax-funded protection agency is a contradiction in terms—an expropriating property protector—and will lead to more taxes and less protection. Even if a government limited its activities exclusively to the protection of pre-existing property rights, the further question of how much security to produce would arise. Motivated (like everyone else) by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but with the unique power to tax, a government agent’s answer will invariably be the same: to maximize expenditures on protection—and almost all of a nation’s wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection—and at the same time to minimize the production of protection. Moreover, a judicial monopoly will lead to a deterioration in the quality of justice and protection. If one can only appeal to government for justice, justice and protection will be perverted in favor of government, constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding. Constitutions and supreme courts are government constitutions and courts, and whatever limitations to government action they might contain or find is determined by agents of the very institution under consideration. Predictably, the definition of property and protection will be altered and the range of jurisdiction expanded to the government’s advantage. Anarchist will eat this up - hehe.